The present invention relates to murine mammary carcinoma cells modified with a nitrate reductase gene fragment.
One of the most pressing health issues today is breast cancer. In the industrial world, about one woman in every nine can expect to develop breast cancer in her lifetime. In the United States, it is the most common cancer amongst women, with an annual incidence of about 175,000 new cases and nearly 50,000 deaths.
Despite an ongoing improvement in our understanding of the disease, breast cancer has remained resistant to medical intervention. Most clinical initiatives are focused on early diagnosis, followed by conventional forms of intervention, particularly surgery and chemotherapy. Such interventions are of limited success, particularly in patients where the tumor has undergone metastasis. There is a pressing need to improve the arsenal of therapies available to provide more precise and more effective treatment in a less invasive way.
Aside from the ethical issues of testing therapies on their persons, human subjects are too expensive to feed and house, and are too unpredictable in their behavior. Consequently, most therapys are tested in vitro or in vivo, using laboratory test subjects such as mice and rats. One major problem with in vivo tests is that the test subject must generally be euthanized in order to determine the effect of the therapy.
We have modified EMT-6 cells (spontaneous Balb/c mammary adenocarcinoma cell line) in such manner that the modified cells can be used to study mechanisms for radiofrequency and light radiation interactions with breast tumor cells in vitro and in mice. The effects of drugs, hormones, and cytokines that affect the expression of nitric oxide synthase and its activity can also be studied to understand the effects of these materials on breast tumor cells.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide murine mammary carcinoma cells modified with a nitrate reductase gene fragment.
Other objects, aspects and advantages of the present invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art from a reading of the following detailed disclosure of the invention.